Odyssey 5.331 · Book 5, lines 331–332
The winds toss the raft between them
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ἄλλοτε μέν τε Νότος Βορέῃ προβάλεσκε φέρεσθαι, ἄλλοτε δʼ αὖτʼ Εὖρος Ζεφύρῳ εἴξασκε διώκειν.
At one time the South wind would toss it to the North to carry, at another in turn the East wind would yield it to the West to drive.
Word by word
The setting
Poseidon's storm has already burst over Odysseus and torn his raft. Now the four winds fall on the wreck, each hurling it toward the next, and the hero clings on like a scrap of thistledown blown across a field.
A note on this passage
The raft has stopped being a vessel and become a thing thrown. Each named wind hands it off to the one across the compass — South to North, East to West — so that the two lines box in all four quarters of the sky. The man is no longer sailing; he is being passed around.
The undercurrent is the total loss of agency. A moment earlier Odysseus was a shipwright steering his own craft; now the verbs belong to the winds, and he is only their object, tossed and yielded like cargo nobody wants. The storm does not attack him so much as forget he is a person.
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